In the latest round of X1’s attempt to figure out how to make money while treating users as poorly as possible, they have now taken back everything that they gave away before. This is version 5.6.4, the “stab in the back” version.

You might recall that in X1 starts to open up…, I had started to revisit my dislike of their business practices, and to think that they had finally decided to work with users instead of screw them.

Well, they decided that was a poor approach. The latest is on this forum posting where they link to the comparison.

There are features most users don’t care about now behind the pay wall such as the below:

Search Uncached Exchange Folders: This means that if you aren’t duping your folders to your local hard drive, they won’t get searched in the free version. I would think most folks do actually cache locally, so this isn’t such a loss.

Search Exchange Public Folders: Ok, this one might hurt. If you use these as a poor man’s knowledge store, you will lose the ability to search. I don’t know of many who did this.

But here’s the real “screw you”, “bait and switch”, “we still don’t respect our users” set of removals:

Search Archived PST Files: This means that if the PST isn’t mounted, you can’t search it. So, time to mount up all those 5 years of email every time you use Outlook. Startup times will go through the roof.

Search Network File Servers: Here we go again. Give and take, bait and switch. Now its removed again. Just apologize already. Yes, home users use network servers to share media. They need to search them. It doesn’t mean they are a big corporation ready to shell out big bucks.

Manageable via Group Policy: Ah, just in case someone decides to install and use the group policy approach I referred to in X1 starts to open up…, they removed that as well.

Support & Maintenance: Duh.

So, yet again, the same folks who decided to “phone home” without telling users and didn’t allow them to turn it off, the ones who tried to say that the “free” version was the same as the old paid version without admitting that they removed features like network search, now goes back on what they gave just a few short months ago. At least now they make it clear: you download, you lose features. I guess that’s an improvement.

It used to take a company the size of Microsoft to treat its users this way, but X1 shows that it can be done by companies of any size.

Feel free to let your IT group know that unless they need the shared index of the X1 Enterprise product, they can tell X1 where to shove it and use Copernic Desktop Search for free. Still highly recommended, still in use on my boxes, and still a winner.

(BTW, Copernic has full group policy handling in their free version, at Copernic Network Deployment. Starts to make you wonder just what X1 is trying to pull?)

Look, its their product. They can shoot themselves in the foot or head all they want to, pull all the features, have no free version, whatever. But to play these games with their users is just wrong. Its disrespectful, and it violates trust. This has been a hallmark of their go-to-market strategy since the earliest days, so you think I would learn. I just expect better from the smart guys over there.